Nicholas Mukhtar hears the same complaint from business owners across engineering firms, wealth management practices and medical groups: younger employees want the corner office without understanding what it took to get there.
“These younger employees want to be the CEO and earn the CEO money,” Mukhtar said, “but they don’t fully understand what it took that CEO to get there. It’s not all Ferraris and nice cars. In many cases it was six days a week of grinding for years.”
That gap shows up constantly in his consulting work, but Mukhtar is careful not to read it as a simple motivation problem. “It’s not that there’s no willingness to work, it’s that they want to work differently,” he said. The distinction matters for how business owners respond to it. Treating the gap as laziness tends to produce defensive management and higher turnover. Treating it as a difference in what “putting in the work” looks like opens up an actual conversation.
The underlying goal hasn’t really changed across generations. A 22-year-old angling to eventually run a company and a 55-year-old already running one are usually aiming at the same destination. What differs is their assumption about the path in between, specifically how visible the effort behind that path needs to be to the people paying them.
Mukhtar sees the same pattern show up in retention numbers across his client base. Employees who feel their effort is misjudged tend to leave rather than argue the point, which turns an expectations gap into a turnover problem before anyone identifies the actual cause. Business owners who lose a promising employee to a competitor often assume they lost on compensation, when the real issue was never having a conversation about what the role actually required in the first place. Mukhtar treats the pattern as predictable rather than surprising at this point, given how often it comes up.
For business owners, the practical takeaway is to get specific about what the current role actually requires before assuming an employee understands the tradeoffs a leadership position eventually demands, rather than to lower expectations across the board. Nicholas Mukhtar’s clients who skip that conversation tend to end up with the exact frustration they started with: a talented employee who feels misjudged, and a business owner who feels like effort isn’t what it used to be. Neither side is wrong about what they’re seeing. They’re just describing two different things and calling both of them work ethic.
The fix costs nothing beyond a direct conversation, which is part of why Mukhtar keeps returning to it across industries as different as engineering, wealth management and healthcare. A business owner who lays out exactly what a role demands, hours included, tends to get one of two honest answers: an employee who commits to it once they understand the tradeoff, or one who says plainly that the tradeoff isn’t for them. Either answer beats months of mutual frustration built on assumptions neither side ever said out loud.
